Posts Tagged ‘J.M. Adovasio’

“J. M. Adovasio, Ph.D., is the founder and director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is the author of The First Americans (with Jake Page).

Olga Soffer, formerly a fashion industry insider, is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Jake Page was the founding editor of Doubleday’s Natural History Press and subsequently its publisher, as well as editorial director of Natural History magazine and science editor of Smithsonian magazine. He has written or coauthored 43 books on the natural sciences, zoological topics, and Native American affairs, most recently Do Dogs Laugh? and Do Cats Hear with Their Feet? He and his wife live in northern Colorado.”

In the late 80’s, I read a book called “The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth” by (Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor). It was very, very, very thick book. But I was deeply interested in what these women had to say (I had just entered my post-Christian years, and was becoming aware of voices like Joseph Campbell as I attempted to connect with my own pre-Christian tribal mythology). After I finished the book, I had the distinct feeling that it could have been about one-quarter the length it was. I also had this thought: “Man, in another twenty years, the research in this field is going to be really good, and a much better book on this subject will be written”. Turns out, I was right.

“The Invisible Sex” is basically the story of the evolution of modern humans based on the best evidence we now have. But it is also a re-examination of not only the role of “women” in prehistoric human society, but also of the assumptions scholars have made about those roles over the last couple hundred years. At long last, the thin scholarship of a book such as “The Great Cosmic Mother” has matured into the thoughtful prose of “The Invisible Sex”.

This book surveys all of the evidence we have about the varied roles of men and women, including both archeological material and ethnographic studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies. But the authors take this a step further, offering a critique of the prevalent attitudes of different researchers and cultures through time, and follow the genesis of popular and pervasive myths such as that of “man the hunter”.

The picture that emerges is a nuanced and, ultimately, believable one. For the fact of the matter is that we don’t know a lot about our early prehistoric ancestors (they were, after all, living their lives before any written evidence). There are some things we can infer from the artefactual evidence and the behaviors of modern tribal people, but there are also a lot of other things that we cannot. This book lays them all out.

Written by a trio of scholars, the writing breezes along with a sense of bold clarity that I really enjoyed. There is even one enjoyable passage where one of the trio expresses his dissenting opinion on a subtle (but clearly important to him) distinction. Plus (in stark contrast to several books I have read over the last year), I noted a complete lack of typographic errors in this book (being a Smithsonian publication perhaps has something to do with this). One wrong word (maybe two) snuck in there, but that’s it.

You may be struck as you read (as I was) that this book is, in a way, mistitled. For it is much more about prehistoric human development in general than the gender roles of women per se. But, then, that may be part of the point of this book: the roles of men and women are not easy to discern in prehistory, but then neither are they so easy to define on a global scale even in our modern world. Men and women have been negotiating their roles from the beginning of time, clearly, even after the point in history in which we developed a conscious concept of gender.

So although this book will do equal damage to the myth of “man the hunter” as it does to the Goddess notions of a book such as “The Great Cosmic Mother”, in doing so it offers us all a much more realistic and believable picture of the no-longer “invisible” women of human prehistory.